The collection / 328 fragments

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328 results · Page 5 of 14Play this collection ▷

01c. 1951 AD

I cut the wood however I like, but it's the grain that decides the strength and shape of it. You can add and subtract memories from people, but it isn't just your memory that makes you who you are. There's something in the grain of the mind.

Orson Scott Card / quote

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02c. 1951 AD

Panem et Circenses translates into 'Bread and Circuses.' The writer was saying that in return for full bellies and entertainment, his people had given up their political responsibilities and therefore their power.

Orson Scott Card / quote

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03c. 1951 AD

They have influence, but no power." "In my experience, influence is power.

Orson Scott Card / quote

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04c. 1951 AD

When you walk on the face of a world, then forgiveness comes.

Orson Scott Card / quote

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05c. 1951 AD

That's what Ender has to understand. There really is evil in the world, and wickedness, and every brand of stupidity. There's meanness and heartlessness and... I don't even know which of them is me." - Hyrum Graff

Orson Scott Card / quote

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06c. 1951 AD

Personal affection is a luxury you can have only after all your enemies are eliminated. Until then, everyone you love is a hostage, sapping your courage and corrupting your judgment.

Orson Scott Card / quote

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07c. 1951 AD

Stories are invented as you go along...

Orson Scott Card / quote

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08c. 1951 AD

While you're governing the colony and I'm writing political philosophy, They'll never guess that in the darkness of night we sneak into each other's room and play checkers and have pillow fights.

Orson Scott Card / quote

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09c. 1951 AD

Because never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along--the same person that I am today. I never felt that I spoke childishly. I never felt that my emotions and desires were somehow less real than adult emotions and desires. And in writing _Ender's Game_, I forced the audience to experience the lives of these children from that perspective--the perspective in which their feelings and decisions are just as real and important as any adult's. ... _Ender's Game_ asserts the personhood of children, and those who are used to thinking of children in another way ... are going to find _Ender's Game_ a very unpleasant place to live.

Orson Scott Card / quote

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10c. 1951 AD

Andrew said you were the best person he ever knew.""He reached that conclusion before he saw me raise three barbarian children to adulthood. I understand your mother has six.""Right.""And you're the oldest.""Yes.""That's too bad. Parents always make their worst mistakes with the oldest children. That's when parents know the least and care the most, so they're more likely to be wrong and also more likely to insist that they're right.

Orson Scott Card / quote

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11c. 1951 AD

You're bigger than I remember," she said stupidly."You too," he said. "I also remember that you were beautiful.""Memory does play tricks on us.""No. Your face is the same, but I don't remember what beautiful means anymore. Come on. Let's go out into the lake.

Orson Scott Card / quote

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12c. 1951 AD

Welcome to the human race. Nobody controls his own life, Ender. The best you can do is choose to fill the roles given you by good people, by people who love you. I didn't come here because I wanted to be a colonist. I came because I've spent my whole life in the company of the brother that I hated. Now I want a chance to know the brother that I love, before it's too late, before we're not children anymore.

Orson Scott Card / quote

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13c. 1951 AD

I've got a pretty good idea what children are, and we're not children. Children can lose sometimes, and nobody cares.

Orson Scott Card / quote

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14c. 1951 AD

But shouldn't they still act like children? They aren't normal. They act like--history. Napoleon and Wellington. Caesar and Brutus.

Orson Scott Card / quote

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15c. 1951 AD

We care about moral issues, nobility, decency, happiness, goodness—the issues that matter in the real world, but which can only be addressed, in their purity, in fiction.

Orson Scott Card / quote

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16c. 1951 AD

Oh no, real life is escape. The great terrors, the horrors--we hope--of your life come from reading fiction.

Orson Scott Card / quote

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17c. 1951 AD

There is no society that does not highly value fictional storytelling. Ever.

Orson Scott Card / quote

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18c. 1951 AD

The commercial work of today is the classics of tomorrow.

Orson Scott Card / quote

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19c. 1951 AD

All these uses a valid; all these reading of the book are "correct". For all these readers have placed themselves inside this story, not as spectators, but as participants, and so have looked at the world of Ender's Game, not with my eyes only, but also with their own.

Orson Scott Card / quote

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20c. 1951 AD

As a child of privilege, no one is your friend. They will claim to be your friends, they will laugh at your jokes and invite you to their parties, but they do not like you. They like your power, they like what you will become someday.

Orson Scott Card / quote

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21c. 1951 AD

A man without a wife and babies is a menace to civilization... One bachelor is an irritation. Ten thousand bachelors are a war.

Orson Scott Card / quote

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22c. 1951 AD

She had always thought that if only people could communicate mind-to-mind, eliminating the ambiguities of language, then understanding would be perfect and there'd be no more needless conflicts. Instead she had discovered that rather than magnifying differences between people, language might just as easily soften them, minimize them, smooth things over so that people could get along even though they really didn't understand each other. The illusion of comprehension allowed people to think they were more alike than they really were. Maybe language was better.

Orson Scott Card / quote

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23c. 1951 AD

the power to cause pain is the only power that matters, the power to kill and destroy, because if you can't kill then you are always subject to those who can, and nothing and one will ever save you.

Orson Scott Card / quote

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24c. 1951 AD

As he thought of it, though, he could not imagine what "just living" might actually be. He had never done it in his life. But he wanted to do it anyway.

Orson Scott Card / quote

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